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Microsoft Yahoo! Technology

Russian Search Engine Yandex Beats Bing 88

Posted by timothy from the but-it-doesn't-sound-verby dept.
judgecorp writes "The Russian search engine Yandex has beaten Microsoft in the search engine rankings, taking fourth place behind Google, China's Baidu and Yahoo, according to ComScore. The result won't be encouraging for Microsoft, which will also be disappointed to see Bing behind its partner Yahoo."
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Russian Search Engine Yandex Beats Bing More

Russian Search Engine Yandex Beats Bing

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  • Oops (Score:5, Informative)

    by Smivs ( 1197859 ) <smivs@smivsonline.co.uk> on Saturday February 09, 2013 @06:57AM (#42842415) Homepage Journal
    The slide into oblivion continues apace.
  • Great, now we're going to get 'Yandexerised' adverts in Russian to go with the 'Scroogled' ads we see. More than anything, it shows that the first product Microsoft needs to fix, is their spell checker. Not a major problem, they'll just keep throwing money at it till their competitors get bored/they patent how the other search engines work and sue them to shut them down/give users an option to use any search engine, but with a huge 'are you sure?' Clippy until you go back to Bing.

  • Cue 'em up (Score:4, Funny)

    by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgw@gmaEINS ... minus physicist> on Saturday February 09, 2013 @07:37AM (#42842551) Journal

    The "BazINGa" and "badaBING" jokes that is.

    In Soviet Russia, the Yandex Bings you?

  • As it seems, Amazing Spiderman (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...didn't help Bing that much

  • It's actually pretty good here too. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09, 2013 @07:54AM (#42842591)

    I use the Turkish version of Yandex (yandex.com.tr).

    It is awesome when it comes to local stuff or very specific topics. Like when online shopping, you just search for the model number of the tv you want to buy and it finds where it's cheapest. You search for a movie, allow it to use your locaiton and "BAM" you get the nearest showtime at the closest place with ticket prices.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by icebike ( 68054 )

      My tests show the same thing.

      I actually think it is simply scraping Google, because there is no sign of yandex in my web server logs, but newly added pages can be found via searchs on yandex, and the only crawler that appears in the log was Google.

      • Yandex has their own browser, which is basically a rebranded version of Chrome - so, instead of sending your history to Google, it sends it to Yandex. I don't know what its UA string is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it presented itself simply as Chrome, for the sake of compatibility with all the browser detection scripts out there.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )
        If your website is not in Russian (Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek) language then it'll be put on the 'back burner' by Yandex. It will be indexed, someday, probably, maybe.

        And that's fine, Yandex specializes in Russian and other xUSSR languages searches - it works significantly better than Google for them. It also knows about public transportation routes, movie theater schedules, etc. There are also Yandex Maps with much better routing info for Russia and Ukraine (and no info at all for the rest of the world) -

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lothos ( 10657 )

        Yandex shows up in my logs as "Yandex bot".

  • This is pretty silly. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @08:03AM (#42842627) Journal

    This isn't a ranking of performance, it's a ranking of 'number of searches', which (for whatever it's actually worth, which is probably ad revenue only) can easily be gamed.

    "Microsoft still attracted 268.6 million unique searchers in December, and Yandex just 74.4 million, which suggests that Yandex aficionados tend to use their search engine more intensively." ...which both points to MS's success in jamming it down people's throats as the 'first search' in any MS device (for chrissakes in Win7 google isn't even OFFERED as one of the search options - you have to download an extension to IE to set google as the default search, lol), AND likewise suggests that the Yandex results are in fact being gamed somehow.

    The Chinese results are simple, it's in CHINESE, which has billions of native users.
    Google dominates the english speaking world, and I guess Yandex gets the Russians.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This isn't a ranking of performance, it's a ranking of 'number of searches', which (for whatever it's actually worth, which is probably ad revenue only) can easily be gamed.

      "Microsoft still attracted 268.6 million unique searchers in December, and Yandex just 74.4 million, which suggests that Yandex aficionados tend to use their search engine more intensively." ...which both points to MS's success in jamming it down people's throats as the 'first search' in any MS device (for chrissakes in Win7 google isn't even OFFERED as one of the search options - you have to download an extension to IE to set google as the default search, lol), AND likewise suggests that the Yandex results are in fact being gamed somehow.

      The Chinese results are simple, it's in CHINESE, which has billions of native users.
      Google dominates the english speaking world, and I guess Yandex gets the Russians.

      I wonder how much the various search APIs and policies influence that. A lot of the major "SEO" companies with their "own" search engines really just use Bing. (shock horror SEOMoz tell porkies).

      Google caps automated search at 100 per day, you can buy more, but not for all the index. Bing has no such restrictions. Yahoo has limited restrictions. I don't know about Yandex or Baidu (but Baidu certainly scan my servers agressively).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      I hate that "feature" at work where we get bing as a default. I have to load the Google search page every time I want to do a search. The reason bing is fourth is because it sucks. Even the non geeks at work don't use bing.

    • Or maybe, becasue Yandex lets you search for the stuff that is blocked on all other search engines. Go try it yourself.

  • “Yandex. We’ll find everything”

    Not a surprising quote considering their obnoxious web crawler behavior.

  • Good for Yandex that they are "taking forth place", but the truth is that they might as well not exist. Anyone who have a website with 10k+ daily visitors will confirm that absoltely nobody is visiting with a referer string from Yandex or Bing. Nobody. They might as well not exist. Another side to this is that Yandex and Bing and other worthless things like 360spider and JikeSpider and Sogou all waste a whole lot of bandwidth, way more bandwidth than users account for on smaller sites. All this bandwidth an

    • Good for Yandex that they are "taking forth place", but the truth is that they might as well not exist. Anyone who have a website with 10k+ daily visitors will confirm that absoltely nobody is visiting with a referer string from Yandex or Bing. Nobody. They might as well not exist. Another side to this is that Yandex and Bing and other worthless things like 360spider and JikeSpider and Sogou all waste a whole lot of bandwidth, way more bandwidth than users account for on smaller sites. All this bandwidth and CPU wasted on spiders and absolutely no results to show for it (except spam-bots from China and Russia). It's tempting just to put -j DROP on Yandex and Bing and the trest of them. I don't do it, but I am very tempted.

      People don't tend to visit sites from Yandex because they don't have to... Yandex provides the information from the site in-line. People who search on Yandex spend less time clicking through web pages, because the infomation they want shows up immediately (at least for answers to common questions like "where can I buy the cheapest X").

      Of course, this means that site owners may want to drop yandex bots for other reasons....

    • Yandex provides much better results for people searching in Russian, or for results specific to Russia.

      (or rather, it's pretty much the case for the entire ex-USSR, and possibly some Eastern European countries)

      Just because it's irrelevant for you personally doesn't mean that it's "useless". Russia alone has 40 million Internet users - more than any other European country. To many of those people, Google is far more useless.

  • that's pretty much how I view Bing. I use the various Bing's Best themes, using their RSS feeds. Or just strip out the images I like (mostly landscapes) and add them to desktop slideshow theme (I have to do this when at places that do not allow RSS).

  • complementary engine (Score:3)

    by e**(i pi)-1 ( 462311 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @09:39AM (#42842999) Homepage Journal
    yandex is a nice complementary alternative. Google and Bing often lead to the same first entries. yandex seems not to update frequently their index so that it refers more to established sites and less to news sites. And it also does not put you into the search bubble.
    • Yandex is, perhaps, a complementary alternative for English speakers. For Russian speakers, like me, it's preferred search engine. It has much higher quality of search results then everything else. Also, image and map searches are much better.
  • Screenshots comparing Bing search results with Google search results. Who will be the first to find the complete lyrics for the late post-goth rock band The Altar? Hint: Album is "Prozac anthems". No cheat: no songmeanings, JUST SEARCH ENGINES. To quantify: The number of false links. The number of correct links and the frequency they occur in the first five pages of search results. The number of search results per page. The total number of search results in five pages. etc. etc. The liklihood of either sear
  • So, doesn't that give Bing 7.4% or something along those lines, since Yahoo just front-ends the bing search engine? (Or did I miss something in the past couple of years of drinking the cool-aid)

    • So, doesn't that give Bing 7.4% or something along those lines, since Yahoo just front-ends the bing search engine? (Or did I miss something in the past couple of years of drinking the cool-aid)

      It means that the user front-end adds significant value for the users who use Yahoo.

      • Insincere apology for commenting on my own comment goes here.

        Examples of popular things on Yahoo's front page:

        Yahoo finance

        Weather

        Popular news stories

        OMG! <-- I know, you hate it, I hate it, but it's still popular.

        Flikr

        Yahoo mail (a lot of people have accounts)

  • That's surprising (Score:3)

    by __aaltlg1547 ( 2541114 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @10:53AM (#42843417)

    Not that Yandex beats Bing. Obviously the main Russian-oriented search engine is going to be a major player, there being 155 million native Russian speakers.

    What's surprising to me is that Bing is SO far behind Yahoo given that Windows computers come configured to use Bing until you change the default search engine in Internet Explorer. They have half the rate of usage of Yahoo, despite copying much of Google's bare style. To me, Yahoo's search pages are inordinately cluttered with ads and junk compared to Google's or Bing's. But I guess if you like the bare style you use Google and if you like the clutter you use Yahoo. Bing needs to find a third option if they're going to be competitive with either of the main English-language oriented search engines.

  • Yandex is pretty cool, actually. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vovick ( 1397387 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @11:21AM (#42843621)

    Although I seldom use their search engine [yandex.ru] directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps [google.com] of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking [yandex.ru], an EXTREMELY convenient product search [yandex.ru] that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary [yandex.ru] and a convenient online storage service [yandex.com] which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school [yandex.ru] where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

    Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS [slashdot.org], chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

  • Do You Know What The Meaning Of The Word 'Bing' Is (Score:4, Informative)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @11:28AM (#42843671)

    In Britain a 'Bing' is a spoil heap, it's a pile of dirt taken from mining and discarded.
    i.e. it's all the worthless crap left behind after you've taken the good stuff out.

  • Don't say this to Microsoft, they'll probably blame Google for it. All I know is what their TV commercials tell me....
    • HAHA Scroogled. Thats clever. Unfortunately there's an even worse one for Microsoft: Microsoft.

  • Keep your posts about Bing-beating to yourself, you perv.

  • RE: Yandex beats Bing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Of course, Bing powers Yahoo Search, so it's sort of meaningless to say that Yahoo "beats" Bing.

    And obviously this is worldwide search share, where Bing is noticeably weak (which is definitely a bad thing). In the US, I'm sure Bing is beating Yandex handily.

  • When looking for a hard to find file, torrents by their nature aren't always the best route. Yandex, unlike google doesn't remove results because of a DMCA takedown request.

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